teahadists And Their Fuzzy Math

As Tea Party favorite Karl Marx once said, historical events occur twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. And so it is with the Tea Party "Contract from America." But rather than following Newt Gingrich's gimmicky 1994 path to retaking control of Congress, the Tea Partiers sound more like Ronald Reagan circa 1980.

After all, the Gipper, too, promised to cut taxes, raise defense spending and balance the budget. Of course, what Reagan produced instead during his eight years in office was a tripling of the national debt and red ink as far as the eye can see.

Undeterred, today's Tea Baggers would condemn America to repeating that history of fiscal disaster, only on a far larger scale. Among the other inanities in their self-contradictory 10-point manifesto, three taken together represent the budgetary equivalent of declaring the sun rises in the west and that the law of gravity no longer applies:

(3) Demand a Balanced Budget: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax hike.

(6) End Runaway Government Spending: Impose a statutory cap limiting the annual growth in total federal spending to the sum of the inflation rate plus the percentage of population growth.

(10) Stop the Tax Hikes: Permanently repeal all tax hikes, including those to the income, capital gains and death taxes, currently scheduled to begin in 2011.

Sadly, the Tea Party's fuzzy math doesn't work. Put another way, you can't get there from here.

For starters, the Bush tax cuts the Tea Party wants to make permanent (10) are largely responsible for the expanding deficits in this decade and the next. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) detailed, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 accounted for almost half of the mushrooming deficits during his tenure. And as another recent CBPP analysis revealed, over the next 10 years, the Bush tax cuts will contribute more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession - combined. (Ending the so-called "death tax," which impacts only 1 in 500 estates, will drain billions more per year from the U.S. Treasury.) An AP chart last fall of data from the Congress Budget Office show the explosion of federal debt that will ensue if the Tea Baggers and their Republicans get their way:

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